More and more movie stars are making their way to the small screen and now Keanu Reeves has joined that growing number. Slingshot Global Media announced today that Reeves is attached to star in and executive produce Rain, an adaptation of the John Rain book series by Barry Eisler. The series is described as “a globe-trotting action drama” that revolves around a half-Japanese, half-American assassin who specializes in making his marks look like they died from natural causes. That certainly has a lot of potential and sounds like a fantastic opportunity for the great Reeves. It’s not set up at a network yet so we don’t know what kind of freedom the show will have; I hear FX and HBO are good places to be.
This would be Reeve’s first starring role on TV and thankfully the press release added that the series is planned as “limited-run programming”. Why I’m thankful for that is more of a personal preference but I also think that’s where the TV landscape is headed. That being said, I think we will also have our sitcoms that overstay their welcome (The Big Bang Theory, Two and A Half Me) and that’s because they're cheap to make and earn a lot of money for people with syndication deals. But for the last few years there has been an increase in shorter or one off seasons (True Detective, Fargo), perhaps adopted from a lot of great British TV (Broadchurch, The Office). The focus on quality over quantity is a good place to start if we want to stay in this golden age of television.
The first John Rain book (A Clean Kill in Tokyo) was published in 2002 followed by six more novels in the series, with another on the way. It will be interesting for readers of the series to see what elements they take from the books for the limited series.
Has anyone read them? How does Reeves as the lead sound?